5.7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 1.0 | |
Overall | 1.0 |
An modern-day assassin, wanting out, is hired for one final job - to kidnap the kids of a local businessman. Things go haywire when it turns out he's chosen to return to the Middle Ages and bring back order to a kingdom in chaos.
Starring: Dominic Purcell, Ralitsa Paskaleva, Bashar Rahal, Marian Valev, Shelly VarodAction | 100% |
Adventure | 24% |
Fantasy | 19% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English SDH, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
UV digital copy
Region A, B (locked)
Movie | 1.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 1.0 |
Let’s face it: Uwe Boll is never going to be mentioned in the same sentence as, say, Orson Welles or Ingmar Bergman, unless as a salient example of antipodes. But whatever one may think about Boll, he continues to crank out movies (it’s probably a stretch to call them “films”) at a regular rate, and whoever is handling his press certainly has no problem promoting the product in perhaps unintentionally humorous ways. The latest case in point: In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission, yet another straight to video offering from Boll that has the somewhat misleading imprimatur “too intense for theaters” emblazoned on its back cover. If you’ve seen any given Uwe Boll outing, you probably already know it’s best to go in to these efforts with the bar lowered to a level that would make limbo impossible, at least unless you were as two dimensional as most of Boll’s characters turn out to be. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale started this lamentable franchise in 2007, back before Jason Statham had quite achieved his present day renown and when the balding action star was still willing to appear in low rent fare like this. The first entry of this trilogy was based on the game Dungeon Seige and played out as a fairly straightforward fantasy. Despite the fact that the film (okay, there I’ve relented) only made a completely embarrassing three million or so in ticket sales, Boll forged ahead with a sequel entitled In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds, which posited Dolph Lundgren in a time travel story that had absolutely no connection to the first outing other than its title. Boll is on hand here in the lone supplement discussing his burning desire to make yet another King, saying he loved the time travel premise but wanted a “better main actor” (take that, Lundgren!) and so settled on his frequent collaborator Dominic Purcell (Prison Break: Season One). Purcell plays burnt out hitman Hazen Kaine, an American who is plying his trade in Bulgaria (what—there aren’t enough potential targets in the United States?). Kaine wants out of this messy trade, especially since he’s nursing the wounds of his own family having been slaughtered, but his handlers have one more assignment for him (hence the title), kidnapping the children of a guy who is alternately described as either the ruler of Bulgaria or just a really rich tycoon (the fact that the screenplay can’t even keep its basic “facts” straight is some indication of just what a train wreck this In the Name of the King is).
In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer. Boll and his cinematographer Mathias Neumann opt for a handheld strategy for almost all of this film, and the result is a "jiggly cam" morass of instability and at least the perception of softness, since the camera literally never alights on any given object for more than a second or two. Boll also seems intent on lightning fast pans during action sequences, perhaps to hide the fact that no adequate fight choreography was done. The result is an okay looking high definition presentation that offers reasonably well saturated color and actually quite good fine detail for the nanosecond or two that you're able to see something in close-up. The CGI is very soft and ill defined, making the dragon seem like less of a threat than a giant flying blob of gray.
In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 sounds about what you would expect a typical movie of the week to offer. There are occasional fairly decent surround effects, including things like galloping horses panning through the soundfield and the whoosh of the dragon's fire hitting various objects, but for the most part this is a fairly restrained track which nonetheless presents dialogue very cleanly and clearly. There are no issues with any kind of damage or other problems to report.
It's truly hard to fathom how Uwe Boll just keeps rollin' along like Old Man River. I personally have yet to meet one single person who likes his movies, and yet he evidently has absolutely no problem raking in enough cash to keep making them and finding willing distributors. I frankly can't imagine even those who might have had a passing tolerance for the first In the Name of the King to find much in this third installment worth watching.
2011
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